PvP

[Artega]

Folks are now upset though because they've put pretzels (PvP honor and rewards) on the barstop causing unruly drunks to drink more beer and eat more pretzels. ;)
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That made my day, Tal :)

[Brista]

My thinking is this

1) Most players are averse to challenge
2) Players who are averse to challenge like to herd
3) bigger herds are more attractive

It will take a certain amount of front to start a character on a 30/70 server on the 30% team if the current level of pvp activity continues. I don't think most of the players will want to do that. I would, you would I suspect, but we're not typical :)

[Brista]

My thinking is this

1) Most players are averse to challenge
2) Players who are averse to challenge like to herd
3) bigger herds are more attractive - they're safer and easier to hide in and you can win fights by weight of numbers without being skillful

It will take a certain amount of front to start a character on a 30/70 server on the 30% team if the current level of pvp activity continues. I don't think most of the players will want to do that. I would, you would I suspect, but we're not typical :)
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[savaughn]

My thinking is this

1) Most players are averse to challenge
2) Players who are averse to challenge like to herd
3) bigger herds are more attractive

It will take a certain amount of front to start a character on a 30/70 server on the 30% team if the current level of pvp activity continues. I don't think most of the players will want to do that. I would, you would I suspect, but we're not typical :)
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Since gameplay, by it's very definition, is the act of artificially creating a challenge for a player to overcome, I would dispute your first bullet. My thinking is this:

1) Most players don't really pick their servers intentionally
2) They either play on the servers their friends are on or (more often) just take what servers Blizz doles out
3) Blizz doesn't tell you if one population is higher than the other on the server when you pick your system.

It takes no amount of front whatsoever to start a character on a 30/70 server on the 30% side if you haven't intentionally gone out of your way to find out what the 30% side is.

[LochnarITB]

Form a mental image of some fat spotty thirteen year old behind the toon
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Heh, I did this very thing just last night. I was running my Tauren hunter on Stonetalon Peak. I had a quest for killing centaurs there. As I was moving around, I came to a named centaur by a moonpool. I had no idea it was an alliance quest giver as I don't think I've ever done any alliance quests in that area. When I targeted him, I didn't notice that he was PvP because the other centaurs weren't and I hadn't yet seen the alliance buildings there in the corner. All I saw was that he was 3 levels above me and I wanted to know how much of a challenge +3 was. I sent Felix in and we took him down. Then I noticed that Felix was green and saw that I was flagged. I didn't feel like hiding and waiting it out and continued on the quest knowing I stood a pretty good chance of being engaged. After a couple more kills, I noticed a Night Elf hunter, a level lower than me, standing off in the distance staring at me. They made no move to kill me so I went on. I made another kill and was looting it when I got hit by a moonfire. This couldn't be the hunter so I turned to look. Sure enough, there was a -1 (unknown) level NE druid blasting me. They had called in the big guns to take care of the "threat". Felix headed after him because I had left him on defensive but I stood there and let him do his business, no emotes or anything. My mistake in attacking the quest giver had set me up to be attacked so I was not bothered by losing the time to get back to my body. I did try whispering him to ask if he had fun ganking but found that you can't whisper the opposite faction. Oh well.

[Artega]

Actually, you got killed for (unwittingly) picking a fight. You didn't get ganked ;)

I imagine that the high-level was just passing through (unless he was in the same guild or something, or it was several minutes after the hunter popped up), since I'd guess Alliance FPs get a little spotty in northern Kalimdor (where most zones are Horde territory or at least Horde-favored.)

[LochnarITB]

Actually, you got killed for (unwittingly) picking a fight.  You didn't get ganked ;)

I imagine that the high-level was just passing through (unless he was in the same guild or something, or it was several minutes after the hunter popped up), since I'd guess Alliance FPs get a little spotty in northern Kalimdor (where most zones are Horde territory or at least Horde-favored.)
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Then your interpretation of the word differs from mine. If the hunter that saw me had chosen to fight, I might have defended myself. When I moved on with my questing, I was clearly not choosing to (picking a) fight. I was clearly not the equivalent of the high level that heads into Crossroads and camps a NPC to keep the horde from completing quests. I also was not in a location where the high level would be just passing through. I was not near the paths from the alliance(?) buildings to the tunnel or the south entrance. Also note that I was bent over looting a quest corpse when I was moonfired from behind by the high level. If not the definition of ganking, it certainly meets the criteria for cowardly and fits the picture of the player I imagined behind the toon.

[nobbie]

I do not like PvP and I am not a casual player. I never would have bought WoW if it were not for the fact that I had been led to believe that I would not have to be the victim of PvP on a PvE server. On a PvE server theoretically, if you don't want to engage in PvP  you don't have to and your gameplay experience will be unaffected by PvP.  We all know that is not true.

1. The opposing faction kills off NPCs which are essential for travel, questing, and the acquisition of skills. This has caused me masive disruption of my gameplay.
2. Battles between opposing factions cause massive lag problems for those who are not involved in the battle.

I wish they would remove PvP from the PvE servers.
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Amen to that.

[lfd]

I imagine that the high-level was just passing through (unless he was in the same guild or something, or it was several minutes after the hunter popped up), since I'd guess Alliance FPs get a little spotty in northern Kalimdor (where most zones are Horde territory or at least Horde-favored.)
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It's not on the way to anywhere; it's a dead-end at the top of a 15-27 zone, on a dead-end flight path[1] from Auberdine. You'd have to go out of your way to get there, as it's not a short run/ride from Astranaar or Nijel's Point, the nearest non-dead-end flight points. As such, I doubt very much that it was someone passing through.

It'll be interesting to see how well balanced-side battles work out; on my server at least, the alliance deal with any horde invasions by zerging, so when they can't rely on (vastly) superior numbers for victory is when we might actually start to see some tactics.

[1] I can't tell from the maps whether or not you can fly to feathermoon stronghold from STP, and I don't have a high enough alliance character to check.

[nobbie]

Why doesn't Blizzard simply makes this on the PvE and RP servers, maybe all servers:

1.) All important NPC's (travel, quests, vendors etc.) cannot be killed anymore (immortality), and they won't attack raiding factions either. Single exception: The Flight Master - if attacked, he can call for help and fly in large amounts of additional town guards/warriors. Or, instead of immortality, if you kill such a "passive" NPC, you'll loose a huge chunk of your honor points - and I mean a HUGE chunk!

2.) All town guards, scouts etc remain the same as before (killable), and: killing these NPC's won't get you any honor points.

[Tal]

I do not like PvP and I am not a casual player. I never would have bought WoW if it were not for the fact that I had been led to believe that I would not have to be the victim of PvP on a PvE server. On a PvE server theoretically, if you don't want to engage in PvP  you don't have to and your gameplay experience will be unaffected by PvP.  We all know that is not true.

1. The opposing faction kills off NPCs which are essential for travel, questing, and the acquisition of skills. This has caused me masive disruption of my gameplay.
2. Battles between opposing factions cause massive lag problems for those who are not involved in the battle.

I wish they would remove PvP from the PvE servers.
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Good news! Blizzard has announced that Battlegrounds will be in place for next patch and the following:

We're taking our first step towards a dishonor system upon the release of the next patch. Trivial civilian NPCs such as quest givers and vendors will now give dishonor points to players that prey upon them. We haven't decided upon a specific penalty but it will be enough that the majority of players will not wish to engage in combat with those NPCs. This combined with the fact that upon the release of Battlegrounds most players will not be targeting towns or unsuspecting adventurers nearly as often, should reduce the need to add too much more in the way of a penalty, or dishonor.

See the full Q & A here

[nobbie]

Trivial civilian NPCs such as quest givers and vendors will now give dishonor points to players that prey upon them. We haven't decided upon a specific penalty but it will be enough that the majority of players will not wish to engage in combat with those NPCs.

What does that mean again: "the majority of players"? All this half-hearted talk again. Anyone who kills such an NPC should get his account banned! ;)

[Tal]

Trivial civilian NPCs such as quest givers and vendors will now give dishonor points to players that prey upon them. We haven't decided upon a specific penalty but it will be enough that the majority of players will not wish to engage in combat with those NPCs.

What does that mean again: "the majority of players"? All this half-hearted talk again. Anyone who kills such an NPC should get his account banned! ;)
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I think that is Blizzard-ese for "We know that there are some asshats who will kill the NPCs no matter what we do so we're ignoring that issue."

But I could be wrong my translator has been offline for weeks. ;)

[Alram]

This is great. I am glad that Blizzard takes into account the views of players like us.

[Drasca]

2.) All town guards, scouts etc remain the same as before (killable), and: killing these NPC's won't get you any honor points.
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Har har har. Didn't you know? US Blizzard promotes griefing. It took Europeans taking the first step to get rooftop camping obliterated. They like NPCs killable, areas campable, and let huge imbalances slide. Blizzard does lip service to any real fixing until there's enough attention to the problem to warrant a financial loss, or someone else sets a competitive precedent (EU).

Also take note of the very intentional placement of quests that send higher level players out of their way into lower level areas of opposing lands.

They want people and NPC's to be killed, elicit a reaction, cause chaos--it keeps attention of the bored, the malicious, and earns them money.

[Occhidiangela]

DOWN WITH PRETZELS! I think we have stretched Ochi's analogy about as far as it can go.  :lol:
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But don't you see, Sir D, that they have promised tortilla chips and spicy salsa (battlegrounds) but all that shows up on the bar is pretzels? This situation takes us to Blutarski's comment to Flounder:

"My advice to you is to start drinking heavily."

Occhi

[Jarulf]

It's not the waiting that can be the problem (I've waited myself for quest NPCs to come back).  It's the waiting for the respawn only to have the enemy faction player kill the quest NPC yet again and again and again so you don't get the chance to talk to the NPC.

I recall in the beta once, took me well over a week to turn in a quest in Crossroads because the quest giver was never there (killed). A good part of the first few days I even spent looking in other towns to figure out if the quest giver was actually in another town and I just remembered wrong (it was not clear from the quest text).

And all this because people that like PvP (and appearantly should be on the PvP server) likes to "provoke to start a fight"??? As someone said, use the guard NPC for that, make them attackable. I can't see a single reason why quest givers (for example) on a PvE server should be killable by choice of the attacker.

[Jarulf]

What does that mean again: "the majority of players"? All this half-hearted talk again. Anyone who kills such an NPC should get his account banned! ;)
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I think that is Blizzard-ese for "We know that there are some asshats who will kill the NPCs no matter what we do so we're ignoring that issue."

But I could be wrong my translator has been offline for weeks. ;)
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[/quote]


The question that pops up then is, why have them killable at all then????

[kandrathe]

This is great. I am glad that Blizzard takes into account the views of players like us.
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We had a little chat on the Stormrage Guild channel about this; The synopsis was that there will still be jerks(expletive omitted) who will try to grief the lowbies. The new Honor system encourages PvP, and Honorable kills results in nice rewards meaning that those "intelligent" players will figure out that Honor pays, and the other is a waste of time.

My contribution was that I agreed that there should be a dishonorable penalty for killing lowbies and npc's should count in that dishonor. We then discussed town raids and AOE causing trouble for dishonorable kills. One idea was that if the lowbie attacks first it does not result in dishonor. To that, I thought that the Honor/Dishonor for an AOE spam should be a function of the weighted average level of those affected. So, salting your raid group with a number of lowbies wouldn't matter as long as the weighted average group composition was high. By weighted I mean that a raid group of 20 lvl 60's and 20 lvl 1's would be weighted toward the 60's such that an AOE would not cause dishonor. Another way to do this would be to have a level cap, meaning that say anyone under lvl 20 would not count in the calculation. I also think the amount of dishonor should be according to the differentlal in levels. Level 60's wiping out the starting zones should accrue the most dishonor.

[kandrathe]

I think that is Blizzard-ese for "We know that there are some asshats who will kill the NPCs no matter what we do so we're ignoring that issue."

But I could be wrong my translator has been offline for weeks. ;)
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The question that pops up then is, why have them killable at all then????
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[/quote]
That would be exploited if they fought back at all. They could be lured out of the area, much like the 20-30 Gadgetzan bruisers that are frequently sprinkled throughout Taneris far from town. So, then they all need leashes, or need to not react at all which could cause different problems. I think it is do-able, but it just needs to be thought through and well play tested.